To address this, the CSAIL team developed a new component in the NN controller that keeps track of the discrepancies between simulation and real-world scenarios, which is used to allow the controller to adapts its output command. However, most methods have been run in simulation but not on real hardware - an issue referred to as “the simulation-to-reality gap.” Researchers have recently turned to neural networks for creating more adaptable control systems. This is no small feat, especially with how complex the flight dynamics are when there are both rotors and wings to contend with. In typical designs, experts manually design controllers for both “copter flight” (hovering) and “plane flight” (gliding) mode, as well as controllers for transitioning between the two modes. “The hope is that a platform like this could make more these more versatile ‘hybrid drones’ much more accessible to everyone.” “Our method allows non-experts to design a model, wait a few hours to compute its controller, and walk away with a customized, ready-to-fly drone,” says MIT CSAIL grad student Jie Xu, lead author of a new paper about the work that will be presented later this month at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. As a result, their control systems often have to be designed manually and from scratch for every drone, which can be difficult, expensive and time-consuming.īut a team from MIT CSAIL aims to make the customization process easier, with a new system that allows users to design drones of different sizes and shapes that can nimbly switch between hovering and gliding - all by using a single controller. These drones are extremely hard to control because of the complexity of dealing with their flight dynamics - typically engineers have to develop one control system for hovering, and another for gliding horizontally like a plane.
To get the best of both worlds, drone designers have tried to develop “hybrid” fixed-wing drones that can fly as efficiently as airplanes, while still taking off and landing vertically like multi-copters. But having rotors severely limits their energy efficiency, which means that they can’t easily carry heavy payloads or fly for long periods of time.
Most consumer drones are “multi-copters,” meaning that they have a series of rotors or propellers that allow them to hover like helicopters.
For as popular as drones have gotten, they still have many drawbacks compared to the fixed-wing planes we use for commercial flight.
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